Every Little Thing
Gennady Bondarenko
In my tenth year of school, I did not know English, although my class was advanced English learning. It’s not that I didn’t know it at all, or at the level of mai neim iz Igor … Zis iz e dog … and all of that Mama myla ramu[1] stuff. My knowledge of English was rather specific. I knew just as much as was needed for a self-trained drummer and back-up vocalist for our high school rock band known as “The Wunderbars.” And by the way, how the name of our band was translated I was only roughly aware of. But why bother? It was enough that the whole Sovietskaya Strana[2] at that time was hooked on the tune of Boney M’s hit about the cheerful, bearded Rasputin… but he danced the kazachok really wunderbar! The song was banned from the radio and the music video was never broadcast on television. However, one only had to hear:
Ra-Ra-Rasputin
Russia’s greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on
And he threw his legs into the dance. And I didn’t know anything about Rasputin, but Bobby Farrell definitely would not have been ashamed of my capering.
Passion for music challenged my passion for the Eastern martial arts, when my cousin Pavel left our seaside city and went to Lviv, on the other side of Ukraine, to study as a military journalist. His father dreamed that his only son would become a military officer. However, in his own dreams, Pavel saw himself as a journalist. A compromise solution was found, to the delight of all, including me: The future officer left me an inheritance of a sort: the reel tape recorder “Yupiter-204” and the sizable collection of “magnetoalbums.” Those were tapes of the so-called neformals, the underground rock bands from Piter[3] and Sverdlovsk. Officially never released, and the groups themselves barred from performance, the Red Wave rock bands were incredibly popular among Soviet youth. Oftentimes, these were no more than “home concert” recordings, and the music promised some kind of encrypted message. “Ivan Bodhidharma moves from the south on the wings of the spring. He drinks from the river where there’s been ice …” A hint at Gorbachev? I asked myself – after all, he also came from the southern city of Stavropol and started perestroika. Very much like “the wings of spring,” aren’t they? Like koans, those images hinted at some mystery, and for a youngster like me, who grew up on English-speaking disco and “new wave” music, this novel experience was indeed mesmerizing:
Сколько тысяч слов – все впустую,
Или кража огня у слепых богов;
Мы умеем сгорать, как спирт в распростертых ладонях;
Я возьму свое там, где я увижу свое.[4]
Yeah, I could feel in these words the taste of that very satori, which was so tantalizingly pursued in the meditations I started along with my karate practice.
On the first of September, I could hardly wait until the end of the celebratory assembly that traditionally started our school year. My only wish was to get to my desk in the back and take a nap. The day before the Wunderbars had played at a dance in the local park of Culture and Rest long after midnight. Actually, we became the Wunderbars after 11 p.m., when the militsiya,[5] public order squad and the park administration went home. Until eleven o’clock, we were still the school amateur ensemble “Karavella” and played songs officially approved by the Komsomol, but then the real piply,[6] in rugged jeans, shaggy, and musically savvy, gathered on the dance floor. That’s when the rock music began. Who said rock and roll is dead and I’m not yet? Let’s see how dead really is!…
I did not get a chance to doze. The class rose noisily to greet the teacher. I got up too, with my eyes already closed. Hearing everyone sit down, I also sank to my seat without opening my eyes.
“My name is Alisa Arturovna,” I heard an unfamiliar voice say. “Stress is on the first syllable of my otchestvo.[7] I will teach you English instead of Roza Markovna.”
I shuddered in surprise.
“And what about Roza Markovna… gone? On her way abroad?”
It was Klaus who said that, with his usual bantering. Why couldn’t he sit still?! Hadn’t he been playing his guitar the whole evening with me?
The class chuckled in amusement.
“The further fate of Roza Markovna is unknown to me. As for your question, my well-informed young man, I only can say: It is the right of every person to live where they consider proper.”
The class quieted down. My sleep vanished as if by magic. With my eyes, I measured up that prickly new teacher of ours, a very young, fair-haired and short-cropped girl in her twenties with a blue cashmere blazer. She stood near the chalkboard, right in front of the class, as if wanting to dot and cross those English i’s and t’s before proceeding to the teacher’s table.
“Do you have any objections?” she asked in a girlishly hotheaded way.
“Them sailors have no questions whatsoever!”[8] Klaus responded again, quite conciliatory. “That is, objections!”
“Since there are no objections, let’s get down to English. Hebrew, they say, is much more difficult.”
The new teacher walked over to the table and resolutely put the fashionable leather briefcase at the very center.
Klaus, from his other side of the aisle turned to me and whistled soundlessly. He got nicknamed Klaus thanks to one of his pranks. Last year at the children’s school matinee on New Year’s, he was given a role: one had to look no further for a better Ded Moroz than a one meter and ninety centimeter tall ninth grader named Kolya Motrych. Everything went well until the very matinee where Grandfather Frost quite unexpectedly presented himself as Santa Claus, to the kids’ indescribable joy. But how could it be otherwise, he explained to the outraged direkrtysa,[9] in our so very advanced English school?! She summoned his parents. Having listened to her furious speech, Nikolai, the senior, remarked cold-bloodily, as befitting of Granddad Frost’s dad: “See no components of a crime. Case closed,” and left her office, entering into no further explanations. The new nickname stuck instantly to the hero of the festivities, just like the white cotton beard of Santa Claus: Kolya-Klaus. All the more so since it harmonized with the rock-n-roll key, with the rising popularity of “The Scorpions” rock band.
Meanwhile, the girl, whose name was Alisa and had introduced herself as our new English teacher, continued as if nothing had happened:
“I’ll tell you right away. You have a newcomer here. I don’t know the city. So will you tell me about it?… You know-it-all young man!”
She looked at Klaus, quite unexpectedly. It was the same old story – no initiative goes unpunished.
“By the way, will you please introduce yourself?”
“Herr Klaus,” he replied matter-of-factly.
The teacher didn’t even raise an eyebrow in response.
“Nice name. And a rare one, that’s for sure. So come on, Herr Klaus, tell me about your city…”
“No problem.”
“…in English!”
“Hey, since when has our city come to be in England? Or have you, the English teachers, stopped understanding Russian?”
“My dad’s Latvian, okay?”
“That’s another matter. But still a difficult task for one – mind if I ask for a lil’ help from my friends? Let Igor join me, okay? Together, we definitely won’t run out of words…”
“All right, two is even better,” she raised her eyes to the class. “Who is Igor, anyhow?”
I got up and reluctantly walked to the chalkboard after Klaus.
“Let’s do it this way,” continued Alisa Arturovna. “One of you will only ask questions… you, Herr Klaus. Let’s pretend that you are actually a tourist, came from the USA. And your guide Igor, by answering your questions, will tell us about the city. Got it? Are you ready?”
“Better from Canada …” retorted Klaus.
“From Canada… what?”
“I’d rather be a Canadian tourist.”
“Why?”
“It’s easier to run off there. I mean, in terms of immigration. Don’t you think Roza Markovna’s the only one who…?”
“Okay, let it be Canada. Since you dislike the States so much.”
“No dislike whatsoever!” exclaimed Klaus eagerly. “For the sake of someone like you, I’m ready even for the States!”
Klaus, I realized, was playing for time, still in search of one of his pranks. Sure, he was a smooth-talking virtuoso, but the lesson had just begun, and our situation seemed quite awkward.
“So, you, Klaus, flew to us from …”
“…Tucson, Arizona,” Klaus suggested readily.
I just couldn’t help but sigh, “That’s all, folks.” Klaus broke loose. An old Bitloman[10] can’t help but draw on his favorite Beatles, Tucson, Arizona – Get back! – Let it be. Having been friends with Klaus for so many years, I learned such things were all but inevitable.
“For your information, Miss Alisa,” I decided it was a proper time for me to enter the scene. “Mr. Klaus is not Herr Klaus from Germany! His hometown is Tuсson, state of Arizona! How are you, Mr. Klaus? Love it here, don’t you?”
“Hey, Mr. Igor! Russian is not problema for me: my dedushka and babushka are from Odessa! Me too want to have praktika in Russian!”
“Stop, stop, that won’t do!” Alisa interrupted us.
“But why?” I wondered quite sincerely. “Mr. Klaus wants to have practice in Russian. The guest’s wish is our command! So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is: I don’t understand!”
“Ah, well, I completely forgot,” Klaus ran his hand over his cheek, “Dad’s Latvian…”
And all of a sudden he asked…
“Do you want us to recite you a poem about our city?” he offered, “In English!”
“I’d be delighted.”
Klaus winked at me, and I could swear I’ve heard the beat of some invisible drumsticks: one… one… one – two – three – four…
Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs
Of every head he’s had the pleasure to know.
And all the people that come and go
Stop and say ‘hello’ …
Klaus’s pronunciation was impeccable. He had studied English almost from the cradle, and it would be surprising otherwise with such a father. Nikolai, the Senior, or Papa Nikolai, was a former military adviser in his time. He had to leave military service because of some tropical illness he’d caught in Africa, and now taught English at an institute. I credit Klaus’s love of the Beatles to his papa’s vibes. The Beatles still were “his everything,” as well as alpinism or the pipe, which he never let out of his mouth.
I often visited Klaus’s house and got along with his parents, as only the best friend of their sole son could. Sometimes I even wondered, “Who’s my best friend actually? Young Klaus, or his dad?” Papa Nik’s interests, and his company seemed so fascinating to me. His alpinism, for example. One would rather expect yachting in our seaside city. You see, they have their own tusovka,[11] Klaus once explained, in the absence of Papa Nik (who was on one of his hiking trips at that time). Klaus showed me the contents of his dad’s mezzanine, and a real treasure opened before my eyes. It was packed with samizdat of the most various kind, from the dissidents of the 60s, typewritten on withered yellow pages in letters already blue from time, to the quite recent-looking photocopies of Castaneda’s books. That was indeed an unexpected twist to the story! Papa Nikolai went only so far as to introduce me to the translation of Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” into Ukrainian, the language even stranger to me at that time than English. Yes, I knew who Steppenwolf was, but, again, only from the song of the same Boney M: a lost and lonely one, he was a Steppenwolf, forever on the run. Oh, how I wished to join them, those wolves of Nikolai, the senior’s pack, when they banded together for their next adventure in search of Snowmen in the Caucasus Mountains, or on an expedition to the UFO landing site in Siberia!
“And the banker never wears a mac,” meanwhile Klaus was rounding off smoothly, “In the pouring rain… ”
Alisa Arturovna sat leaning back in her chair and slightly nodded her head. The astonishment in her eyes shifted to joy in the moment, as if she had accepted the rules of the game and decided to join in.
“Very strange!” I snapped out at last, so as not to be silent.
“That’s what it is, our city!” announced Klaus. “So how do you like it?”
“Great! That description is indeed wonderful! As for you two – well, a good start. Congratulations on the first two “fives”[12] in this school year.”
Klaus and I slapped hands.
“Yes!” said Klaus and nodded at me. That was my first “five” in all my years of studying English. We went back to our places.
“And yet,” continued Alisa Arturovna. “I still do not lose hope to hear something about your city, and not only about Liverpool.”
Klaus and I looked at each other, and he whistled again. This time aloud.
The magical mystery day wasn’t going to end there. After lessons, there was an event awaiting us and no less intriguing than the arrival of a new teacher. Some time ago, Klaus had sent a letter to the Beatles fan club, the real one, in Britain. He’d found its address in a Polish youth magazine that our school library subscribed to. Somehow Klaus mastered this language, too. “A real treat for an amateur decoder,” – he laughed it off. “The Ukrainian language written in English letters!” Still, he’d been hesitant to send the letter by regular mail. Yes, there was Gorbi[13] with his perestroika, “new thinking” and all that … but somewhere out there, in Moscow. However, our faraway city life went on as usual. Nobody fought with the “pernicious influence of the West,” as it had been a few years ago, so Klaus decided to play it safe. He’d handed the package to one of his father’s friends, a master mariner, whom he jokingly called Captain Flint, asked him to send it to the addressee in the nearest foreign port. To his letter he added a compact cassette with the Beatles’ songs he recorded by himself with a guitar on his home tape recorder. With pirate cunning, Captain Flint smuggled all this stuff through customs, and now, it seemed, the reward had found our hero.
It just couldn’t be otherwise because the day before Klaus had discovered in his mailbox a post office receipt with his name on a registered letter from London. Assuming the possible consequences of such correspondence, Klaus secretly told the news only to me and our bass player Nikita, who was studying in a parallel class in our school. Our keyboardist Gosha went to another school, so we decided to show him the letter in the evening at rehearsal. No time to traipse through half the city. Every minute is precious! For that matter, it was unclear whether they would give us the letter without inquiries or start asking questions right at the post office.
Hardly waiting for the end of the last lesson, we stood for some time at the trolleybus stop, then went on foot, shifting over to a speed-walk. The trolleybus caught up with us, and the rest of the way we rode. Somehow, we travelled the whole way in silence. I thought I could hear Klaus’s heart pounding. He, however, tried to look carefree and only fiddled with his passport. At the post office, approaching the window, he took a deep breath and handed the receipt and passport to a post office clerk with thick square glasses. She sighed and waddled off to a dimly lit room at the back of the room. We waited in silence. Before long she returned with a thick package in her hands.
Klaus put his signature on the blank, took back his passport, and we went outside. The envelope’s thick brown paper sported a row of stamps, again with a lady, but not with glasses – this time with a tiara.
“See this, guys?” he pointed excitedly at the envelope. On its right side, below the stamps, was written clearly by hand…Mr. Nicholas Motrych!
“Nicholas, that’s it! Any idea who that might be?”
We looked around the street. No one was going to arrest us, neither the militsiya nor the KGB seemed to have any interest in our little adventure.
“Let’s go back and open it in the school park,” said Klaus. “We aren’t supposed to open it right here, are we?”
No sooner had we gotten off the trolleybus than we saw Alisa, apparently returning from school and leisurely strolling down the park’s central alley. Klaus was the first to notice her.
“Look, Kit!” he said to Nikita, “Our new anglichanka.[14] Instead of Roza.”
“And where is Roza?”
“Sort of called it quits.”
“Emigrated, or what? And they let her out, did they?”
“Why not? Isn’t she a secret physicist… or a rocket scientist?”
“Good for them, these émigrés,” Kit sighed. “Fade away quietly abroad, without a sound.”
“Probably they do exactly that,” agreed Klaus. “You know what, guys? Let’s show Alisa our letter!”
Nikita looked at him in bewilderment.
“You say! Mind playing “Zeppelins” to direktrysa?”
“Don’t worry, she’s a cool dudette.” Klaus stood up for the young teacher. “Gave us ‘fives’, me and Igor…we read her ‘Penny Lane’.”
“Fives – for that?” Kit repeated incredulously.
“You bet!” confirmed Klaus, and shouted at the top of his voice:
“Alisa Arturovna! Alisa Arturovna!” With the stress on the second syllable.
She stopped abruptly, as if expecting some kind of catch again, this time less innocent.
“Back to school, guys?” she asked at last.
“Back to the USSR! And we mean it!” said Klaus in an excited tone, and seeing that she hadn’t grasped it, handed her the envelope.
She turned the letter from London in her hands while listening to his story. Eyeing Klaus intently for some time, she finally said in a serious tone:
“Da, eto postupok”[15] and then, to my great surprise, added the phrase Klaus had said just minutes ago, almost word for word: “Let’s go to my place and read it. I live nearby. We aren’t going to open it right here, are we?”
On the way she told us that she lived in a rented one-room apartment and received the appointment to our school right after graduation from the pedagogical institute. “I never planned to work as a teacher at all,” she admitted easily, “and even less did I plan to move here. If it hadn’t been…. hadn’t been for your wonderful southern city, I’d be elsewhere,” she finished quickly. Yet another surprise was still waiting for us in her dwelling, Spartan-looking in every other way.
Right on the floor stood a powerful Sharp double-decker, quite a luxury in a typical Soviet home. The big cassette tape recorder rose up almost to the knees of diminutive Alisa. Near it was a neat cassette rack with music matching the owner’s tastes: Duran Duran, Men at Work, Eurythmics, the ubiquitous Sade and Bryan Ferry.
Anticipating our questions, she explained that the Japanese tape recorder, quite simply, was a gift from her boyfriend, her would-be fiancé. A young lieutenant, and a recent graduate of the Naval Academy, he too served in our city (“Actually, that’s why I’m here,” she said with a relaxed smile). Recently he’d been assigned to some friendly near-Eastern country to help build up their naval forces. However, Alisa explained that when he returned from that international deployment, they would get married. After that, he would serve a little more and become a first-rank captain, and then they would be happy. “Not necessarily in that order,” she added hastily, as if catching herself on some unexpected thought.
I searched with my eyes for a picture of this all-too-lucky lieutenant, some kind of photo in a picture frame but found none. Meanwhile, Klaus and Kit exchanged knowing looks. To them, the children of military servicemen, it was no secret what it took to get such an assignment.
“What papa does one need to have?” sneered Kit. “Or what paw must you grease to be promoted for such… eeer…foreign trips?”
Alisa was seemingly hurt by his words:
“You, too, don’t look like some kids from troubled families,” she retorted quickly, “judging by your prikid.”[16]
We chuckled.
“My dear young English lady,” Kit replied with delicate familiarity, trying to smooth over the awkwardness of his remarks. “We are not kids – we too are men at work! We don’t ask our parents for money. We earn it ourselves!”
…And this was the sheer truth. The whole summer we’d played on the dance floor and got paid seventy rubles a month. Having such riches, it was no problem to buy brand-name jeans without asking our parents for money. Still, if they had allowed us to perform our neformals only, we would have agreed to play eight days a week, asking for no money whatsoever.
We opened the package.
In addition to a typewritten fan club letter, it also included a Beatles poster. Alisa carefully unfolded what turned out to be the famous picture of the Beatles “in squares,” upon which someone had written sweepingly in a thick red marker, BACK IN THE USSR, for real this time!
Kit’s eyebrows went up to his forehead.
“Man, you’re what, a psychic?”
“No, I’m not a magician,” said Klaus, apparently no less surprised. “I’m just learning, you know!”[17]
Alisa, meanwhile, began to read the letter, in a sing-song voice, mockingly pretending as if she were delivering a speech from some high tribune at a Komsomol meeting:
“Dear Nicholas, our faraway but yet so close friend from behind the Curtain…”
Hiding our smiles, we exaggeratedly nodded our heads in “unanimous approval.” Still, I noticed that our man of the hour, Nicholas, was pondering something:
“Have this poster for yourself,” he said at last and looked at Alisa. “This is a gift. I already have all the walls in my room plastered with them – one more, one less won’t make a difference. I hope it fits right in here.”
Alisa scanned him for a brief moment:
“That is a kind gesture,” she said, again seriously, as it was when we met in that alley, but I saw laughter in her blue eyes, “of a real man at work.”
School over, the beginning of adulthood caught us unexpectedly. I didn’t go anywhere, even if I did finally decide what institute I wanted to enroll in. Just after the school departure party in June, Kit and I crashed on his “Jawa” motorbike at a bend in the road. Kit broke his jaw, nose and shin. As for me, my arm, ribs and two toes on my right foot. Plus, we both had concussions, bruises and abrasions. I fully recovered only by mid-August. Kit was checked out of the hospital in September.
By that time, Klaus had already started studying to be a Ukrainian philologist in Kyiv. The decision came wholly unexpectedly for everyone, probably, except for Papa Nikolai. He only smiled mysteriously into his beard, responding to questions by saying, “I eto pravilno!”,[18] mimicking Gorbachev’s southern accent. However, I also expected something in that vein. When Klaus returned from the capital and visited me, I asked, “No possible regrets, after all those years studying English?”
Klaus just shrugged, “I already know English – but the same can’t be said for Ukrainian. Admit this, bro: it’s plain weird when you don’t know your native language.” Copying Alisa, I only could say that this was quite an act altogether.
Still Klaus obviously wasn’t going to part ways with English. Judging by his enthusiastic comments on the Ukrainian translation of “The Godfather” he shared with me, the future was spread before his eyes, which could not be said about mine. Klaus seemed to read my thoughts, “Join the race, Tigris! Foreign language is always the quest! He was a Steppenwolf, who found a love at last! Maybe you’ll need English for this?”
We did not see each other all autumn. He came home only for the October Revolution holidays, having asked for a few days off at the university. In October, the USSR Ministry of Defense, represented by the local military registration and enlistment office, examined my health and found that I had recovered enough to serve in the Navy. I received a draft notice for the ninth of November. On the sixth, Klaus dragged me to school for the holiday event. The program, by tradition, included an official part in honor of the anniversary of Great October, a concert with amateur children’s performances and a dance party.
But instead of the disco, they invited the vocal and instrumental ensemble called Druzhba, known also as The Dynamites to its fans, the rock stars of our neighborhood. The Dynamites were older guys, already a semi-professional group that performed constantly, never missing a chance to play at restaurants and rich weddings, earned decent money and remained in patronizing friendship with us.
We skipped the official part and arrived during the dancing. In the semidarkness of the school gym turned into a dance floor for the occasion, some couples were already lazily swaying to a slow dance. Dimon Kovalchuk, vocalist and lead guitarist of the Dynamites, was drawling out a popular hit song imitating a famous singer:
Быть может, мы могли бы быть и счастливее,
Но в чем наше счастье, не знал бы никто.[19]
Dimon finished singing, looked over and nodded for us to join in. We went up and shook hands.
“Want to play, dude? Kinda shaking up good ol’ days?” he asked Klaus. “While I take a breather? We still have all the holidays’ work in the kabak[20] ahead of us.”
Klaus looked enviously at Dimon’s semi-acoustic Cremona electric guitar. Dimon intercepted his gaze, grinned approvingly and went to the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” he said into the microphone. “Cuties and beauties, and their gallant companions. Please welcome the famous guitarist, who has immortalized your school’s name forever and ever. And this, as you, of course, know, is……Klaus! Let’s greet him with your applause!”
The audience responded with languid clapping. Taking advantage of the break, the gallant companions picked out the cuties and beauties from the flock and swept them into the autumn darkness right outside the school gym’s back entrance. Dimon, in the meantime, took the guitar off his shoulder, brought Klaus aside and they quietly talked over something. Apparently, Klaus was checking the playlist.
Unlike Dimon, who liked to show off in front of the microphone, Klaus seldom drew attention when playing. He just lightly tried the strings on the guitar’s fret-board, tuning the instrument. I looked around the gym space, at teenagers fidgeting as they waited for the next song to dance to, and saw Alisa. She stood in the far corner of the gym, talking with the fizruk.[21] Apparently, the youngest teachers ‘volunteered’ to ensure order for the teenage event. Finally, Klaus struck the strings and the crowd began to move. Having played some more teenage hits, he looked around for Dimon and motioned to his throat: No way! Out of practice! Dimon accepted the guitar and in the same nonchalant way, as if he were in a restaurant and not at school party, announced in the microphone:
“It’s twenty to eight, our dear gals and guys, and one need not explain what that means,” he said in a soft rolling voice. His audience answered with an understanding hum: Who in our seaside town hadn’t heard this merry song about ‘seven-forty’?
“And this means that our one-man orchestra has a right to deserved rest too. So let’s ask him to perform an encore!”
Yes, Klaus indeed switched from an electric guitar to an acoustic one. Setting the one microphone to the strings, he sang another, this time a solo:
When I’m walking beside her
People tell me I’m lucky
Yes, I know I’m a lucky guy
Klaus would not be himself if he didn’t finish his performance with some of his favorite pieces from the Beatles:
Every little thing she does,
She does for me, yeah
And you know the things she does,
She does for me, ooh…
No encore followed this one. Hardly anyone listened to the acoustic song in the gym-turned-disco. The same teenage rampage was going on, as always, which I had used to watch with such delight from my drummer’s place. Now, when Klaus sang to the guitar, all this commotion seemed wrong to me, and even annoying. “Well, well, young man,” I said to myself and shook my head, “it only took you a few months after school to become such a…”
However, I was mistaken. Someone was really listening to Klaus, and with such intense attention that it was electrifying the atmosphere around that listener. Unwittingly, I turned my gaze to Alisa. She was drawn into the words of the song, like raindrops to soft sand. A shadow fell on her forehead, as if she was trying to answer some uneasy questions to herself, as if putting the question marks after those lines of the Beatles song: I remember the first time I was lonely…? Can’t stop thinking about…? Finally, as if waking up, she turned and headed for the exit, followed by the surprised look of the PE teacher. I didn’t even have time to think how nice it would be to meet her again, and to tell myself how improper this thought was – so quickly did she disappeared through the doorway. After that, I never saw Alisa again.
[1] Mаma washed the window frame: the first phrase from a school primer in the former USSR.
[2] Soviet Land.
[3] Informal name of Leningrad, today Saint-Petersburg.
[4] How many thousands of words, are all for nothing,
Or fire-stealing from blind gods;
We know how to burn like a spirit in outstretched palms;
But I will take mine where I see mine.
– A line from the famous song of the ‘Aquarium’ rock group
[5] Police.
[6] People, in hippy slang (from English).
[7] Patronymic, middle name, derived from father’s first name.
[8] Popular meme-phrase in Russian.
[9] School principal.
[10] Beatlemaniac.
[11] Informal gathering.
[12] A-grade in the Soviet school.
[13] Gorbachev
[14] Rus: Englishwoman (informal name of the English language teacher).
[15] Rus: That’s a real stunt!
[16] Rus. slang: outfit.
[17] Another popular meme-phrase.
[18] That’s the right thing to do! (phrase that became popular after Gorbachev).
[19] Maybe we could be happier / But nobody would know what our happiness is.
[20] Rus., vulgar, for restaurant.
[21] Physical education teacher.